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An exciting and busy day yesterday – lots of good talks, good conversations and good beer! Back at the sessions this morning and the first keynote of the day by Sam Ghods of Box: “MySQL: Still the Best Choice for Mission-Critical Data” The usual story of a (file sharing) application that started out on one [...]
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Here it is finally – the MySQL conference 2012 starts with the Keynote Sessions. The first keynote speech is by Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona and a very smart guy and also by Baron Schwartz (Percona), another very smart guy, the brains behind a number of toolkits for MySQL. They’re talking about the MySQL Evolution [...]
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A very well attended Pedro’s dinner – I didn’t count, but we had 9 tables of 8-10 people or so – dare I say almost a 100 people? Lots of beer, margaritas and good conversations! Here are a few pictures from the event
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Wow what a lot has changed since the last MySQL conference I blogged about in 2007 MySQL has been acquired twice, once as MySQL by Sun and the second time around bundled with Sun when Oracle bought Sun. The conference is no longer organized by O’Reilly but by Percona. And the MySQL database itself has [...]
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Wow what a lot has changed since the last MySQL conference I blogged about in 2007 MySQL has been acquired twice, once as MySQL by Sun and the second time around bundled with Sun when Oracle bought Sun. The conference is no longer organized by O’Reilly but by Percona. And the MySQL database itself has [...]
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Are you attending PerconaLive?

Allow me to suggest you attend the Common Schema: a framework for MySQL server administration session on April 12, 14:00 - 14:50 @ Ballroom F.

This talk is by none other than Roland Bouman. Roland co-authored parts of common_schema, and is a great speaker.

I have a personal interest, of course, being the author of most of the components in common_schema. I would like to convert you to a supporter of this project. I know a few very smart people who think this project is an important tool. I would like more people to get to know it. Eventually, I would like developers and DBAs alike to consider it an inseparable part of any MySQL installation.

Then I shall have world domination, Bwa ha ha!

PS,

Have fun, I will unfortunately not attend myself this year. Having been on the program committee, I can tell it's going to be a great conference!

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This post complements Henrik's Call for Nominations for 2012 MySQL Community Awards.

Recap: we keep the tradition of awarding MySQL community members for their notable contributions to the MySQL ecosystem.

Previously, the awards were given by MySQL AB/Sun. Later on they were given by the community itself, as will follow this year, when the awards are presented during the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, this April.

Henrik describes in details the three categories: community contributor, application, corporate contributer -of the year.

A bit more about the categories

To add to Henrik's description of the categories, keep in mind the following:

• Community member would be a person. That person could be working by himself/herself, or can be part of some corporate. It does not matter. What matters is the person's contribution.
• Application: some code or project which either enhance/complement MySQL (e.g. Replication/HA solution) or uses MySQL. In the latter case, it is important that MySQL role's in the application is significant. For example, some popular site built with some CMS using MySQL may not qualify, if it could run just the same with PostgreSQL or other databases, or if the owners are not actually aware or at all mindful about the specific database technology they are using.
• Corporate: we're still figuring this one out. The general idea is to acknowledge a corporate which, some way or the other, did a good thing to the MySQL ecosystem or the community.

A bit more about the nomination and voting process

Anyone can nominate anyone! Please send your nominations by mail to mysql.awards@gmail.com. Please specify who/which your nominee is, in which category, and why. Kindly include disclosure of relationship with nominee (this does not disqualify, we just want to have everything in the open), if applicable.

At this stage we are just collecting as many names as we can, so please keep these coming!

When all names are collected we open a discussion between voting committee members, followed by a poll on each category.

Traditionally, there have been three winners in each category. This is no longer the case, and has not been as such in the previous two years. Now, there are no strict rules to that; we go with the flow. If there just aren't enough votes for some nominee, we may choose not to award said nominee. So, if two nominees get a high number, say 5 votes each, from the community, and the next one only gets one vote, then we will probably only award the two. This is roughly what happened last year.

I say "there are no rules" because we follow our common sense and the insights provided by the various members of the panel.

A bit more about the people involved

The voting panel is comprised of winners from previous two years, in addition to the conference's chairman and chairwoman. I think the list of people involved is diverse and balanced.

Henrik and myself are secretaries, which means we manage the discussion board and the voting process and participate in the discussions, without voting ourselves. We kinda just took the position to ourselves, it looks great on our resume. We can later apply for secretary jobs anywhere we like.

So as you can understand, this whole thing is just a community effort to keep up a good tradition. There are no written standards or guidelines, just the common sense, goodwill and etiquette of the people involved.

Name your nominee!

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As a member of the the conference committee I review the session and tutorial proposals for the Percona Live MySQL conference in Santa Clara, 2012.

The sessions are expected to be technical, and I'm happy the proposals follow this guideline. I use Giuseppe's and Baron's general guidelines for submitting a proposal. I wish to humbly add a couple notes myself.

Be fairly brief

Explain your session/tutorial as clearly as you can. The reader should be able to get the general impression of the session from two or three paragraphs. Some can make a point in two sentences; for most it would take somewhat more.

If you're going to talk about some database feature, for example, please do not write the manual for that feature. That's for the session itself. Just explain how you're going to discuss the feature, and why it should be of interest (e.g. what the benefits of this feature are, the risks or pitfalls, the ingenious C code behind it or the quirks of the operating system involved).

Clarify

It's important for me to understand two things when reading a proposal, which establish the grounds for better evaluating the proposal:

• Who the target audience is (newbies, developers, DBAs, Linux internal experts etc.)
• To what depth are you going to deliver the content you describe.

That is not to say you should explicitly state "This session is for MySQL DBAs", but the attendee should be able to easily decide whether your session appeals to his type of work or expertise. I, myself, have happened upon sessions that were completely different from what I expected. To illustrate, I give two examples, while not disclosing the exact details:

• A session which was about locking in database. I got the impression it was about ways to avoid locking, issues with mutexes etc. It turned out to be a discussion between the presenter and a few member of the audience about the specific code internals, lines 667-684 in the lock_module.cc file, and the recently reported bug. To me it was more like the weekly rnd meeting of some company. I couldn't understand anything of the entire talk.
• A session promising insight on working out great scale-out with some product: I was expecting to hear of the "DOs and DON'Ts", or of great configuration and implementation tricks on the subject. However, it turned out to be more of a general talk on "how we used the product in our company and found it to work great".

The two sessions above were perfectly valid, and had their place in the conference. But were poorly described in the two respects I mentioned.

A great submission, in my opinion, is one where attendees get what the expect, and don't shyly leave the conference room 15 minutes into the talk.

Submit a proposal here.

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I have a bunch of notes from the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011, and I figure its about time I started blogging it. These are notes from the panel on the SkySQL Reference Architecture, led by Kaj Arno and Ivan Zoratti. The notes are raw (read their FAQ for more), and I talk a little bit about the SkySQL Configurator at the end (a tool I immediately used, and submitted some bugs/improvements for – 7 at last count, which I hear got fixed in the 0.02 release, which got pushed last night!).

There were 7 panelists. The MySQL world needs:

SkySQL Provisioning tools:

• SkySQL Manager – control and administer the SkySQL/MySQL environment
• SkySQL Configurator – configure and update SkySQL reference architecture modules
• SkySQL Tuner – analyse the configuration and prepare the packages

I did a test, and it seemed like I got binaries built in under 5 minutes. Custom configurations with a stock build. You get a 70MB binary. Hosted at http://www.enovance.com/. A lot of people never configure their my.cnf, so I think having a GUI on the web might be a good idea to help people have sensible defaults.

lovegood:skysql byte$ ls
total 143352
drwxr-xr-x    3 byte  staff       102 14 Apr 06:13 ./
drwx------@ 598 byte  staff     20332 14 Apr 06:13 ../
-rw-r--r--@   1 byte  staff  73395132 14 Apr 06:12 SkySQL-mariadb-poboffcfrm5bi054559q8iea74.tar.gz

lovegood:skysql byte$ tar -zxvpf SkySQL-mariadb-poboffcfrm5bi054559q8iea74.tar.gz
x etc/
x etc/my.cnf
x install
x packages/
x packages/xtrabackup-1.4-74.rhel5.x86_64.rpm
x packages/MySQL-client-5.5.10-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm
x packages/MySQL-server-5.5.10-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm

SkySQL is also going to have a customer advisory board, and they are starting it this week. (I don’t know any further details about this as of yet.)

The SkySQL Configurator can only get better. I expect it will do custom packages including things like Sphinx/SphinxSE, Drizzle, and other things in due time.

Related posts:

1. O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011 – register now to save!
2. Services Oriented Architecture with PHP and MySQL
3. Federation at Flickr: A tour of the Flickr Architecture

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Having the conference behind now, I’m reviewing some of my impressions and of sessions I attended.

The people

To begin with, this conference was a big success for me, in many respects. The sessions were great (more on that later), but of course, meeting with new people and with familiar people, was the more important part.

I live in Israel, which makes travel to the US very long and expensive. Apparently not many MySQL community members in my neighborhood, so I don’t ever get to meet the faces. The conference makes that possible. I did not participate in all community events, as I had scheduled calls with little girls who miss their father. And I was very much under jet lag. And I have more excuses on demand.

But I did get to meet known faces; people I only knew by name; unfamiliar people who were familiar with my work (fun!); and otherwise just (ex-)strangers.

The sessions

There was a variety of sessions to choose from. Many times, I had to pick one out of two or three sessions I was interested in, running at the same time. Not all sessions appeal to one in the same way, but looking back, I find there were a lot of GOOD sessions I attended. I mostly like sessions that are very technical; preferably drilling into details of algorithms & implementation.

I wish to review some of the sessions I attended. I can’t possibly review them all, so my apologies to those I left out.

Monday

• Learn how to cure MySQL replication deprivation with Tungsten! / Robert Hodges (Continuent.com), Edward Archibald (Continuent)

This is actually the first time I learned about the internal details of Tungsten. Robert, CEO of Continuent & original developer of Tungsten, did an excellent job in reviewing the various aspects of Tungsten. But rather than being a promotional talk, this was a purely technical tutorial.

So it was interesting to understand the difficulties in building Tungsten, at least on the MySQL part. For example, the Tungsten replicator must do its own filtering of events based on server id, since, although a replicating slave knows how to ignore circular queries issues by itself, there is no client API to do so; you can’t “send over” the server id along with a query and expect the server to ignore it.

As seems to be the current and emerging paradigm, parallel replication is possible by paralleling queries from different schemata. But apparently Continuent seem to want to change that. That is, there’s nothing that strictly forces that this must be the paradigm; it’s just the current implementation.

Giuseppe was in charge of live demos, and has shown stuff like slave disconnect, fail over, multi-master replication etc. Edward Archibald later presented a cluster-like solution based on Tungsten and a replication aware connection proxy.

There was plenty of time for asking questions. Interesting technical issues were discussed and answered. It was also stated very clearly what Tungsten does not do for you, or when it may actually be the gun with which you shoot yourself in the foot. Good talk!

Tuesday

• MQL-to-SQL: a JSON-based Puery Language for RDBMS Access from AJAX Applications / Roland Bouman (XCDSQL Solutions / Strukton Rail)

Roland is now passionate about finding an easier query language for web applications to use. Rather than SQL, he suggests using MQL (created by Freebase). MQL uses JSON (-like) syntax to describe both queries (requests) and result sets (responses). I won’t go into the details since Roland himself laid them out on his blog.

As usual with Roland, his session is well thought of. He describes an elegant, appealing syntax. In my opinion, MQL is an intuitive language. It is easily comprehensible by both DBAs and developers. Possibly by my mother.

However Roland goes further and offers his MQL-to-SQL, an open source implementation of a translation tool between the two languages. In his presentation, he demonstrated some simple and some not-so-simple queries, generated by MSQL, translated to SQL, the results of which translated back to MQL.

MQL is not an all-purpose solution. You don’t do analytics with MQL, but it does seem to answer some problems that other ORMs (e.g. Django) are, to the best of my knowledge, unable to perform in convenient manner (that is, without reverting to some SQL-like syntax).

Special thanks

Thanks to Giuseppe Maxia, when on MySQL Replication Advanced Techniques he presented some of the openark kit tools, and, having located me in the crowd, invited me to speak.

To be continued

I need to prepare for my flight. Will probably publish next part(s) once back home. Hope to see you all next year!

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